Laurence Tribe

When the Constitutional Convention convened in Philadelphia to debate and write a new constitution for the United States, there was a concerted effort to ensure that the new nation would break from the corrupt practices of the Old World....“When he takes the oath to uphold the Constitution he would be lying,” said Laurence Tribe, constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School. “He can’t uphold the Constitution, one of whose central provisions he would be a walking, talking violation of.”

The Embassy of Bahrain plans to host its annual National Day celebration at President-elect Donald Trump’s lavish Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C....“They know that they will be currying favor with Donald Trump,” said Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School. “Around the world it’s regarded as an ordinary way of business that you favor the enterprises and businesses of the head of the government in order to get ahead of everybody else.”

Anti-Trump forces are preparing an unprecedented assault on the Electoral College, marked by a wave of lawsuits and an intensive lobbying effort aimed at persuading 37 Republican electors to vote for a candidate other than Donald Trump...“There might well be a clamor to get rid of the Electoral College altogether, a move that would have some disadvantages (like eliminating Hamilton's safeguard) but many advantages as well,” said Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University. “Anyhow, clamor and anger have become par for the course in this loony election year.”

Jill Stein is on track to raise twice as much for an election recount effort than she did for her own failed Green Party presidential bid. Fueled by the social media hashtag #recount2016 and millions of dispirited Hillary Clinton voters, Stein's recount drive had already netted $6.3 million by Monday, according to her campaign website. That's close to the $7 million she posted as a goal and millions more than the roughly $3.5 million she raised during her entire presidential bid...Laurence Tribe, a Harvard constitutional law professor, said that although recounts are "entirely within the law," Stein's effort is probably aimed more at "trying to gain attention and establish herself as a national player."

Constitutional lawyers and White House ethics counsellors from Democratic and Republican administrations have warned Donald Trump his presidency might be blocked by the electoral college if he does not give up ownership of at least some of his business empire....Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe said in an email that the “electors who are to cast their votes for president on 19 December not as automatons but in light of constitutional constraints and principles cannot in good conscience vote for Donald Trump as president of the United States unless he fully divests himself of economic interests dependent on the fortunes, for good or ill, of the private Trump empire”.

The Foreign Emoluments clause of the U.S. Constitution — you might have skipped over it in social studies — says that no person holding any office of profit or trust can receive gifts from foreign powers. The idea was to prevent meddling in U.S. policy by other nations. Some scholars [including Laurence Tribe] argue it doesn't apply to the president, but presidents have certainly acted as if it does. And many scholars say it and statutes like it are a mine field for the future Trump Presidency.

Members of the Electoral College should not make Donald Trump the next president unless he sells his companies and puts the proceeds in a blind trust, according to the top ethics lawyers for the last two presidents...Eisen’s conclusions are shared by Harvard Law Professor Larry Tribe, one of the nation’s preeminent constitutional scholars. Tribe told ThinkProgress that, after extensive research, he concluded that “Trump’s ongoing business dealings around the world would make him the recipient of constitutionally prohibited ‘Emoluments’ from ‘any King, Prince, or foreign State’ — in the original sense of payments and not necessarily presents or gifts — from the very moment he takes the oath.” The only solution would be to divest completely from his businesses. Failing that, Tribe elaborated on the consequences:

An obscure line in the Constitution has become a rallying point for some legal experts and critics of Donald Trump, who fear the president-elect has little intention of making a clean break between his business interests and his new White House role...Trump’s determination to cling to his global empire “creates an ongoing risk that foreign individuals and interests will confer commercial benefits on hotels, golf courses, or other businesses” connected to him, argued Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University. The greatest worry, according to Tribe, would be that those benefits might induce a President Trump to make or influence decisions “to the disadvantage of national interests” and in favor of his own. “Trump can’t receive any direct payment of any kind from a foreign government, including a fee for services,” argued Noah Feldman, another professor at Harvard and an expert on constitutional law, in a column for Bloomberg View.

Despite telling Hillary Clinton that she’d “be in jail” if he became president and egging on his crowds to chant “Lock her up!” it appears that Donald Trump isn’t going to pursue charges against their former Democratic rival...“Under the laws and Justice Department regulations governing federal prosecution, a President Trump would not have legal authority to direct the Attorney General to appoint a special prosecutor to ‘look into’ Hillary Clinton’s email situation or the Clinton Foundation or anything else,” explained Laurence Tribe, professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, in an email to Fortune Magazine after the second presidential debate. “That’s not within a president’s power.”

Not long after he took office, President Obama sought advice from the Justice Department about a potential conflict of interest involving a foreign government. He wanted to know whether he could accept the Nobel Peace Prize. The answer turned on the Emoluments Clause, an obscure provision of the Constitution that now poses risks for President-elect Donald J. Trump should he continue to reap benefits from transactions with companies controlled by foreign governments...Laurence H. Tribe, a law professor at Harvard, said that he found Mr. Tillman’s argument “singularly unpersuasive” and that it “would pose grave danger to the republic, especially in the case of a president with extensive global holdings that he seems bent on having his own children manage even after he assumes office.”

Shortly after he became president-elect, at a time when most incoming leaders are greeting well-wishers and pondering their plans for the nation, Donald Trump reportedly tried to leverage his new status against a foreign leader to enrich himself. Argentine President Mauricio Macri was one of many such leaders to call Trump and congratulate him on his electoral college victory over Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. According to a report in the Argentinian paper La Nacion...Trump asked Macri during this call to “authorize a building he’s constructing in Buenos Aires.”...Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe agrees. “If this report is accurate,” Tribe told ThinkProgress, “it’s both alarming and disgraceful and clearly implicates the principles at the core of the Emoluments Clause.” Though Tribe notes that “some scholars have made serious arguments to the effect that this Clause contains a loophole for the highest official in our Government,” Tribe finds those arguments unpersuasive. “In my view, the language of the Clause literally covers financial benefits foreign powers might bestow on the American President, and the anti-corruption and anti-divided-loyalty purposes of the Clause apply even more clearly to the President than to any less august officer.”

Donald Trump’s most senior advisers said on Sunday that he would not illegally use the White House for personal profit, as concerns mounted that he was already mixing business interests and official duties....Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard who taught Barack Obama, said on Twitter that Trump was risking legal action from business competitors if he did not move to stop the presidency benefitting him financially. Tribe described Trump as “uniquely suable” thanks to his current corporate setup.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe. I remember well how I felt as dawn broke the morning after Barack Obama’s election as president in 2008. My hopes were boundless, my expectations unrealistic. That President Obama did not succeed in mobilizing the deeply transformative political dynamic I dared to anticipate is no doubt true, especially in light of this year’s election results. But looking back, I remain enormously proud of my former student and chief research assistant. Obama achieved great things both domestically and globally, all in the face of deeper recalcitrance and obstruction than most of us had imagined possible...The contrast with how I felt the morning after this election could not have been starker. The electoral vote victory of Donald Trump, a bigoted and ill-informed bully who called forth the worst impulses in many of his followers, and who inspired the emergence of the vilest elements of our society, including unabashed KKK racists and neo-Nazis, felt then and continues to feel utterly devastating.

Q: Can the Electoral College elect Hillary Clinton on Dec. 19? A: Yes, it may be constitutionally possible; but no, it will not happen, according to election experts....“Presidential Electors are theoretically free to vote as their consciences dictate, something the founders anticipated Electors would indeed do under Hamilton’s Electoral College invention,” Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, told us via email. Tribe said the constitutionality of imposing a fine on a “faithless elector” is “open to doubt, and it is even more doubtful that a court would compel any Elector to be ‘faithful’ to the State’s winner-take-all outcome.

In November 2000, as the Florida recount gripped the nation, a newly elected Democratic senator from New York took a break from an upstate victory tour to address the possibility that Al Gore could wind up winning the popular vote but losing the presidential election. She was unequivocal. “I believe strongly that in a democracy, we should respect the will of the people,” Hillary Clinton said, “and to me that means it’s time to do away with the Electoral College and move to the popular election of our president.” Sixteen years later, the Electoral College is still standing...Some states have discussed a possibility that would not necessarily require amending the Constitution: jettisoning the winner-takes-all system, in which a single candidate is awarded all of a state’s electoral votes — regardless of the popular vote — and instead apportioning them to reflect the breakdown of each state’s popular vote. Two states, Maine and Nebraska, already do this. But even that approach could face a constitutional challenge from opponents, said Laurence H. Tribe, a professor at Harvard Law School.

A bipartisan group of congressional members and candidates is filing a federal suit Friday against the Federal Election Commission, seeking to force the agency to act on a complaint it brought against 10 super PACs in July. ... The powerhouse legal team working on the case — which includes Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard University, and Richard Painter, who was the chief ethics lawyer for former president George W. Bush — faces an uphill fight. Half a dozen federal appellate courts have held that contribution limits cannot be placed on groups doing independent spending.

This year, Dorothy E. Roberts ’80, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and a leading scholar on legal and biosocial theory, is…

...In one way or another, Harvard Law professors helped shape Obama’s legacy. But the relationship between the Law School and the next president has yet to be defined. A trove of emails from Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta, leaked by Wikileaks in October, show that a few Law professors have caught the campaign’s attention. And Clinton’s campaign has contacted at least one about serving in her administration if she wins next Tuesday. There is no indication that Trump’s campaign has contacted any Law professors. “I think law is about policy choices so by definition we are always involved in policy choices,” Law professor Christine A. Desan said, referring to her fellow faculty members...fewer Law School faculty members are actively and openly advising either candidate in this election—a noticeable shift from previous elections, said Law Professor and former U.S. Solicitor General Charles Fried.

Eleven days before the election, the FBI stepped back into the realm of presidential politics Friday, with FBI Director James Comey saying agents had found emails that might be of relevance to an earlier investigation of Hillary Clinton. Comey’s letter to Congressional leaders was short. It was vague. And it was political dynamite. Donald Trump seized on it. Clinton decried it. The timing is unprecedented. This hour On Point, October surprise. The FBI and this wild campaign. Guests...Larry Tribe, professor of constitutional law at the Harvard University Law School.

Harvard's Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) joined Jim to talk about the Supreme Court, and the 2016 election. Tribe said that the court is doing its job, and doing its best. However, with the court divided four to four, it means that some lower court decisions will have the last word. "An eight justice court cannot be allowed to become the new normal," he said. Tribe said that Merrick Garland would be a great justice, and deserves a most serious deliberation.

When Donald Trump recently asked his supporters in Ohio to keep an eye out for voter fraud on election day, his plea came with a knowing suggestion: “When [I] say ‘watch,’ you know what I’m talking about, right?”...Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School agrees that Mr Trump’s “First Amendment defence would no longer be airtight” if his campaign advocated racial harassment at “a rally in close proximity to the time and place where people were waiting to cast their ballots”.